{"id":104678,"date":"2016-06-10T16:38:40","date_gmt":"2016-06-10T22:38:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/greeley-oil-slump-means-theres-room-at-the-inn\/"},"modified":"2016-06-10T16:38:40","modified_gmt":"2016-06-10T22:38:40","slug":"greeley-oil-slump-means-theres-room-at-the-inn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/greeley-oil-slump-means-theres-room-at-the-inn\/","title":{"rendered":"Greeley oil slump means there\u2019s room at the inn"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Joshua
Joshua Polson\/The (Greeley) Tribune<br><br>An oil and gas truck sits by the Clarion Hotel sign recently in Greeley. Oil and gas trucks are an increasingly uncommon sight in hotel parking lots across Weld County as fewer workers are in the oilpatch because of the slumping price for crude.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

GREELEY (AP) \u2013 Visitors looking to book a hotel room in Greeley this summer likely will have better luck than they would have last summer.<\/p>\n

The northern Colorado city\u2019s occupancy rate is down, the price per room is down and new hotels are slated to soon bring more than 200 rooms to the area.<\/p>\n

A Rocky Mountain Lodging Report released in April showed the occupancy rate in Greeley fell from 73 percent in 2015 to 59.4 percent in April 2016.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can see how the market has weakened,\u201d said Robert Benton, who helps put together the lodging report. \u201cIt\u2019s primarily the decline in energy prices and the pullback in energy companies that have stopped drilling.\u201d<\/p>\n

The booming oil and gas industry in 2013 and 2014 pushed the demand for rooms way up, creating a tight market for those seeking short-term stays.<\/p>\n

In 2015, the Homewood Suites by Hilton opened to fill some of the demand, but the demand already was waning. At the end of 2014, the market started to slip, and many of the oil and gas workers from Texas and South Dakota went home.<\/p>\n

Two more hotel projects \u2013 the downtown hotel and convention center and a Holiday Inn Express north of Centerplace \u2013 are in the pipeline, according to the Greeley Planning Department\u2019s commercial development list. The downtown hotel is slated for a 2017 finish, and the Holiday Inn Express recently was approved by the planning commission, but an open date isn\u2019t yet planned.<\/p>\n

Brian van Buskirk, owner of the Fairfield Inn, said oil and gas business accounted for about 30 percent of the hotel occupancy in the past few years, but the hotel\u2019s occupancy hasn\u2019t dropped 30 percent with the pullback.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen oil and gas was strong, we displaced a lot of the normal business to Loveland, and now we\u2019re getting some of that back so we\u2019re not feeling the full brunt of it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd there\u2019s still some oil and gas going on that fills rooms. They still have to service the rigs, and certainly there\u2019s still the big boys out there drilling.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the oil and gas industry started to go south in 2014, Van Buskirk said they saw the problems coming and adjusted accordingly.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe knew it was happening, so our projections went down quite a bit,\u201d he said. \u201cWe saw it. We absorbed it. I think the length (of the downturn) has surprised us, but it\u2019s nothing we weren\u2019t prepared to weather out.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said there are many other industries in the area that keep the hotels busy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe still have our core business of agriculture, county government, JBS, Leprino (cheese factory). Some of those larger businesses are still here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not a dire situation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Renee von Weiland, senior vice president of Spirit Hospitality, which operates the Hampton Inn and Suites, 2350 29th St., and the Candlewood Suites, 3530 29th St., in Greeley, as well as others in Loveland and Fort Collins, said she agrees the industry likely will start to rebound soon.<\/p>\n

The slower year hasn\u2019t slowed them down, though. Spirit has hopes to add about 500 rooms to the region in the near future, she said. More information was not immediately available on those hotels, though von Weiland did say one will be in the a development in Loveland.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, von Weiland said, there is a fast-growing tourism industry in northern Colorado to keep them busy.<\/p>\n

\u201cTruly within a 500-mile radius, there\u2019s over 16 million people, and within 500 miles, people think, \u2018Oh, we can drive there,\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Plus, there\u2019s development in Loveland to attract even more of those travelers, referencing the many projects that have been announced along the Loveland corridor of Interstate 25.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlmost 23 million cars go through northern Colorado on I-25 every year,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

All of those factor into the 200-300 rooms being built in Greeley.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s normal to see planned hotels continue to move forward \u2013 even in a slow market.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt takes a year to build a hotel,\u201d he said. \u201cSometimes you just say, \u2018Well, I\u2019m just going to go ahead and do this because I know eventually markets are going to get better.\u201d<\/p>\n

And all things considered, von Weiland said the market isn\u2019t as bad as it could be.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs I said, 2014 and 2015 were banner years,\u201d she said. \u201cOur numbers right now are kind of going back to before that, which is still good.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even without oil and gas, von Weiland said she thinks other local industries will carry the area hotels.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s so much coming into northern Colorado. The growth of northern Colorado is really pretty amazing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI kind of feel like we\u2019re going to be a destination.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greeley, drilling dip drops room rentals<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":104679,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5742,5735],"tags":[120,11,221,1529],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-104678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","category-news","tag-colorado","tag-economy-general","tag-gas-and-oil","tag-lodging"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104678\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104678"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=104678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}